


oh, the flowers inside you are wilting

by TheTartWitch



Series: Flowers Out of Season [3]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe, Angst, Character Death, Flower Language, Gen, Hanahaki Disease, I Wrote This Instead of Sleeping, I know Severus's parents have names, Latin as spells, Multiple Deaths, Room of Requirement, Sad, Severus POV, Severus is a sweet child, Severus is not in love with Lily, They just don't ever come up here, and i'm lazy - Freeform, at least not all the time - Freeform, i guess, the Marauders are not all dicks
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-22
Updated: 2017-02-22
Packaged: 2018-09-26 06:37:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,423
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9871829
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheTartWitch/pseuds/TheTartWitch
Summary: Severus misses his mother.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Have some sad!Severus POV. You're welcome.  
> I know canonically the Marauders are dingalings. But sometimes I just want angst that isn't caused by the Quartet of Doom.   
> (Except for Peter. He's always an arse.)
> 
> I honestly don't know what you want me to say. Have some almost-midnight-where-I-am fic.

He almost ignores it, the perfect spread of white and yellow tulip petals scattered on the stone of the Great Hall, but it’s drawing a commotion from everyone. Girls are picking up petals and puzzling over them, boys are kicking blossoms about and wriggling them in each others’ faces, and everyone else is sticking back and watching with dubious glances at the staff table. Severus glances up as well.

Dumbledore’s eyes are twinkling as usual, but the set of his mouth and the tilt of his glasses says he’s worried. Severus looks down at his robes, and finds a pretty, star-like flower pinned to his lapel. Someone must have pinned it with magic, he thinks, and his eyes flicker to Lily, seated with the Marauders. She’s laughing.

It’s probably something harmless.

\--

That’s what everyone thinks, until a Slytherin third year collapses in a puddle of glistening oak leaves. Her friends giggle and pull her to her feet, believing it to be an elaborate prank, but her head lolls and the oak leaves are covered in saliva and thin trails of blood. Two burly fourth years help carry her to the infirmary. 

The next day, the two girls who’d cleaned up her oak leaves began coughing into napkins, and later that week both of them had wheezed petunia and lavender into their palms. 

Severus had stared at his rhododendron and tried not to worry when he felt a tickle in his throat.

\--

By the next month of term, the professors were encouraging students not to handle any flowers or tree leaves that appeared on the stone of the castle’s floors, but it was too late. Over a fourth of the school’s population had whatever this mysterious disease was, and many more were probably hiding their symptoms or didn’t realize they had it yet. 

The night before, Severus had coughed up a red spider lily. He had to look it up in the library, grabbing a book for identifying plants and another on magical plant-related illnesses. That’s where he found it: Hanahaki Disease. Coming into contact with the spell on a plant’s leaves or flower caused the growth of flowers in the lungs. However, you could only become infected if you carried an unrequited love. If your love didn’t love you back, you would eventually suffocate on the flowers growing in your lungs and die. If the flowers were removed, so would every memory of the one you loved. 

It sounded ridiculous.  _ Love? Love  _ was causing all this sickness? Unrequited love? That was crazy. 

It was magical.

A lot of magical illnesses were caused by ridiculous things, he reminded himself, scowling at a passing first year. He stood, flapping his robes around himself like a cape, and left the library with the book still open on the table to the page on Hanahaki. 

The next morning everyone knew, and the hunt for who’d originally cast the spell began. 

Lily was still laughing at dinner, and Severus cursed the stab of unease he felt when she glanced at where the original flowers had been scattered. 

\--

_ (Sometimes, when he’d exhausted all other methods of distracting himself, he lingered on the fact that red spider lilies were thought to mean death, or a change of heart so great it was as though the person you’d once been had died.) _

_ (He became increasingly inventive at distracting himself.) _

\--

Over the school year, over twenty of the younger students had to be sent to St. Mungo’s. Three girls and a boy died. The incident with the flowers went from being a harmless prank to being a matter of Auror inclusion. 

Severus spent the rest of the year collecting the full flowers that had been strewn about. He was already infected, he explained to a curious Auror, and anyway, beautiful things ought to have a beautiful home. He collected them in vases and filled the Room of Requirement with them, each with placards if they were from the dead girls or boy. 

Several people made full recoveries, fully losing the memories of their former beloved, and subsequently dissolving several friendships as they were simply forgotten. Severus didn’t have to worry about friends leaving him for fear of catching Hanahaki; almost the entire school had it, and when the students went home for winter holidays, their siblings and parents would catch it as well. Hanahaki’s cure wasn’t a spell to be cast or a medicine to be distributed; it could only be cured through requited love or surgery to remove the feelings. 

Besides, he had no friends anyway.

\--

It’s the week before winter holidays and the school is in business mode. Aurors observe every class and make note of suspicious actions: that Friday, they arrest a seventh year for casting  _ flos spiritus _ , the trigger spell for Hanahaki, and then scattering the infected tulips in the Great Hall in the hopes of infecting the one they loved in an attempt to see if they loved him back. He ended up spitting up marigolds in St. Mungo’s for three more weeks and finally getting the surgery. 

Before all of that, though, it’s a Monday and Lily and the Marauders suspect him of casting the spell. They trail him and his spider lily-laden footsteps to the Room where he’s stashing the petals. The Room recently added a window through which the sun shines even on cloudy days, and Severus sits in a huge, puffy armchair in the center of his petal-filled jars and basks in the sunlight. He keeps a small jar on the side table next to the armchair, and when he coughs up petals or whole flowers he drops them inside it.

There will be no St. Mungo’s for him, no mother prematurely grieving him, no father to sit at his magical bedside and stare forlornly into the blank space of the opposite wall; he wants to die here, in this chair, if his disease is going to kill him at all. He wants to die in the sunlight, so that when they finally find his body, cool and still and perfectly preserved in the magic of the Room, like the flowers and their petals, they will not be able to say he died Dark. Because he wouldn’t have.

Lily and the Marauders watch him from an alcove by the door, lazing in the sunlight amid twinkling towers of soft petals and leaves. 

“How boring,” says Pettigrew, but none of the others say that. They recognize Severus’ slow desperation. When they leave, they resolve to keep that day a secret, but Pettigrew only lasts thirty minutes before he sidles up to a Hufflepuff girl and tries to get her attention the only way he knows how. By the next morning, the girl’s Gryffindor friend has told everyone she knows, and the story of Severus Snape collecting the flowers of the ill falls from people’s mouths like unrequited love.

\--

“Who are they for?” Potter asks him once, on the last day of school before winter holidays. Severus is staying at Hogwarts, as he does every year, and Potter is so late to the train that it’s going to leave him behind. “The flowers,” Potter says, as though his question needs clarification.

Severus stares at him tiredly. He wants to ask why it matters, but with every petal that passes his lips he loses more of his old fire. He gets worse every day, and he knows he won’t make it to the end of the year: he won’t get the surgery because he refuses to lose the memories he has left of her, and he won’t be cured because it’s impossible.

He walks away, eyes growing duller every moment, and Potter knows that if he followed the Slytherin they’d end up in the Room, sitting in a field of undead flowers and filling out the hollow left in a puffy armchair.

\--

His mother died last year, battling an illness that had plagued her whole life, and this is the year he dies for her.

\--

Three months later, as Severus Snape lies dying in St. Mungo’s hastily-constructed Hanahaki Ward, the red spider lilies he’d left in a jar on the side of the armchair are collected by Potter and Lily and Black and Lupin and taken to the lake. Severus dies at 11:46 that evening, and Lily gives a sobbing eulogy over the waters of the lake where they left Severus’ lilies to float and eventually sink.

\--

A month later, aquatic flowers begin rising to the surface, along with mermen corpses choked on flowering air.

**Author's Note:**

> As always:  
> comments are my lifeblood;  
> prompts are loved and a wonderful way to inspire other writings;  
> any mistakes in this are fully mine (but please be gentle because I'm going to post this and then probably pass out from my busy day;  
> you are amazing and fantastic and so, so appreciated.


End file.
